CHARLY COX

Love is also continued frustration. It’s anger. It’s hurting. It’s denying it for months and only seeing its presence, for the first time, in a memory. It is not always just the butterfly chase that you expected. Sometimes it’s also resentment. It’s embarrassment. It’s putting all of your dreams on hold, totally swept in not realising. It’s endurance. It’s anguish. It’s not what you wanted, not what you went looking for in your absent search for the next thing. It’s intoxicating, it’s routine, it’s hard goddamn work. But they don’t tell you that. Or maybe they do. Maybe you weren’t listening. Maybe you were hanging off the end of a feeling late night WhatsApps gave you. Hanging off the end of movies, of prematurely-written poetry you’d penned in hope of one day arriving there with a person. It’s horrid. It’s gross. It’s real and it stinks in a romantic putrid parma violet sweetness. So today you hate yourself for thinking you knew what love was but when it arrived you couldn’t send it back quick enough. Laying in your pants on the sofa with last night’s curry reheated screaming to no one but the ceiling.

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”